Earthquake Induced Liquefaction Using Shake Table Test

Loose saturated cohesionless soils may undergo liquefaction due to strong ground motions. Such liquefaction causes significant damage to the structure resting on such soil. The extent of damage primarily depends upon soil properties, intensity of earthquake and type of structure. Various analytical models have been developed to estimate the likelihood of liquefaction of particular site based on field performance. However, if it is possible to identify the sites which are likely to liquefy due to specific intensity of earthquake it will help implementing the reduction in the damage which it would otherwise cause. One such analytical model has been developed by one of the authors of this paper and has been found to satisfactorily demarcate ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ zones of liquefaction for number of earthquakes. However, earlier research shows that laboratory tests could also be conducted to study the liquefaction behavior of soil under specific condition. The present study mainly deals with an attempt made in conducting Shake Table Test in laboratory by simulating earthquake conditions on site. The results obtained from the trial tests have been compared with the actual field cases and also with laboratory tests conducted for such soil by other researchers. It is observed that the criterion of the occurrence of liquefaction in the laboratory model is in close agreement with actual field data. Shake table test is found to be more effective in simulating the strong ground motion during earthquake

Acclimation to warm temperatures modulates lactate and malate dehydrogenase isozymes in juvenile Horabagrus brachysoma (Günther)

Differential expression of isozymes enables fish to tolerate temperature fluctuations in their environment. The present study explores the modulation of lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) and cytoplasmic malate dehydrogenase (sMDH) isozyme expression in the heart, muscle, brain, liver, gill, and kidney of juvenile Horabagrus brachysoma after 30 days of acclimation at 26, 31, 33, and 36°C. LDH and sMDH zymography were performed using native polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. The zymography revealed five distinct bands of LDH isoenzymes (labelled from cathode to anode as LDH-A4, LDH-A3B1, LDH-A2B2, LDH-A1B3, and LDH-B4) and three distinct bands of sMDH isoenzymes (labelled from cathode to anode as sMDH-A2, sMDH-AB, and sMDH-B2), with considerable variation in their expression in the tissues. Acclimation to the test temperatures did not influence the expression patterns of LDH or sMDH isozymes. Densitometric analysis of individual isozyme bands revealed a reduction in the densities of bands containing the LDH-B and sMDH-B molecules, while the densities of bands containing the LDH-A and sMDH-A molecules increased in the gills and muscle, indicating the role of these organs in adaptive responses to thermal acclimation. However, the total densities of the LDH and sMDH isozymes increased with higher acclimation temperatures, indicating that adaptation to increased temperatures in H. brachysoma is primarily characterised by quantitative changes in isozyme expression

Studies on Thyroid Hormones and some Biochemical Constituents of Follicular Fluid in Buffalo

Present study investigated the levels of some biochemical constituents and thyroid hormones in follicular fluid and serum and compared their concentrations in different size follicles of buffaloes. Buffalo ovaries with unknown reproductive status were collected from abattoir. The follicles visible on its surface were classified based on their diameter as small (<5 mm), medium (5-10 mm) and large (>10 mm) follicles. Twenty four samples from follicles along with blood samples of buffaloes belonging to respective category were collected. The follicular fluid and the serum samples were analyzed for total proteins, albumin, cholesterol, glucose and hormones tri-iodothyronine and thyroxine. The results of the present study revealed that, there was no specific trend observed in the levels of total proteins and albumin according to the size of the follicles but there was significant difference (P<0.01) in the levels of total proteins in follicular fluid and serum. The levels of total cholesterol showed increasing trend as the size of the follicle increases but the variations are not statistically significant. The serum total cholesterol concentration was significantly higher (P< 0.01) than that of follicular fluid. There was increasing trend of glucose concentration in the follicular fluid and also in the serum of respective buffalo with increase in the size of the follicle but the difference was non-significant. The serum glucose concentrations were significantly higher than the levels in the follicular fluid. There was no variation in the serum levels of triiodothyronine between buffalo bearing small and medium sized follicle while, highest serum level was observed in buffalo bearing large sized follicle. The significant (P<0.01) increase in the levels of T3 in large sized follicle may attribute to the increase in the activity of monodeioniase enzyme. The follicular fluid thyroxine level showed increasing trend with the size of the follicle but the variation was not significant. There was no significant variation in the levels of T4 in serum and follicular fluid in all the groups.

Biological Control of Sclerotium rolfsii, Causing Stem Rot of Groundnut by Pseudomonas cf. monteilii 9

In an attempt to develop effective biocontrol system for management of stem rot disease caused by Sclerotium rolfsii in groundnut, 11 Pseudomonas spp. isolated from rhizospheric soil, were evaluated for their antagonistic activity against Sclerotium rolfsii. A soil bacterium identified as, Pseudomonas cf. monteilii 9, showed highest antagonistic activity against Sclerotium rolfsii. In dual cultures, the Pseudomonas cf. monteilii 9 inhibited the Sclerotium rolfsii up to 94 % in terms of dry weight. Pseudomonas cf. monteilii 9 produced diffusible antibiotic, volatile metabolites, hydrogen cyanide and siderophore which affect Sclerotium rolfsii growth in vitro. This strain also produced a clear halo region on skim milk agar plates, indicating that it excretes protease which played vital role in inhibition of S. rolfsii. In pot assay for control of Sclerotium rolfsii, Pseudomonas cf. monteilii 9 treated seeds showed decrease in incidence of disease up to 45.45 to 66.67% in comparison to untreated seeds

Enhancing In Vitro Stability of Albumin Microbubbles Produced Using Microfluidic T-Junction Device

Microfluidics is an efficient technique for continuous synthesis of monodispersed microbubbles. However, microbubbles produced using microfluidic devices possess lower stability due to quick dissolution of core gas when exposed to an aqueous environment. This work aims at generating highly stable monodispersed albumin microbubbles using microfluidic T-junction devices. Microbubble generation was facilitated by an aqueous phase consisting of bovine serum albumin (BSA) as a model protein and nitrogen (N2) gas. Microbubbles were chemically cross-linked using dilute glutaraldehyde (0.75% v/v) solution and thermally cross-linked by collecting microbubbles in hot water maintained at 368 (±2) K. These microbubbles were then subjected to in vitro dissolution in an air-saturated water. Microbubbles cross-linked with a combined treatment of thermal and chemical cross-linking (TC & CC) had longer dissolution time compared to microbubbles chemically cross-linked (CC) alone, thermally cross-linked (TC) alone, and non-cross-linked microbubbles. Circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy analysis revealed that percent reduction in alpha-helices of BSA was higher for the combined treatment of TC & CC when compared to other treatments. In contrast to non-cross-linked microbubbles where microbubble shell dissolved completely, a significant shell detachment was observed during the final phase of the dissolution for cross-linked microbubbles captured using high speed camera, depending upon the extent of cross-linking of the microbubble shell. SEM micrographs of the microbubble shell revealed the shell thickness of microbubbles treated with TC & CC to be highest compared to only thermally or only chemically cross-linked microbubbles. Comparison of microbubble dissolution data to a mass transfer model showed that shell resistance to gas permeation was highest for microbubbles subjected to a combined treatment of TC & CC

Correlation between maternal serum biochemical markers with karyotyping for prenatal screening of foetal chromosomal abnormalities

Background: Prenatal screening for chromosomal abnormalities can be done by biochemical screening tests like dual marker test (DMT), triple marker test (TMT) and quadruple marker test (QMT). It is important to identify ideal screening test among them which best correlates with result of karyotyping which is confirmatory test of foetal chromosomal abnormalities. This helps to decrease need for invasive prenatal tests for foetal karyotyping. This study aims to evaluate sensitivity, specificity, diagnostic accuracy and correlation of DMT, TMT, and QMT with results of karyotyping.Methods: Retrospective observational study was conducted in tertiary care maternity hospital over one year- 1st January 2015 to 31st December 2015. Women with singleton pregnancy undergoing DMT, TMT or QMT were included.Results: Of the 529 women screened by biochemical marker tests, 462 (87.33%) were screen negative and 67 (12.66%) women were screen positive. In 56 women, it was false positive (83.58%) and in 11 women true positive (16.41%). In 461 women the test results were true negative (99.78%), but in one case, result was false negative (0.21%).  3/11 (27.27%)women with foetal chromosomal abnormalities were primigravidae. 4/11 (36.36%)women were below 35 years. DMT and QMT had higher sensitivity (both 100%) and specificity (90.00% and 93.18% respectively) than TMT (sensitivity 80% and specificity 82.61%). Positive likelihood ratio (LR+) was 1.00 in DMT. Diagnostic odds ratio was highest with DMT (DOR=115.11) and best correlated with karyotyping results (coefficient of correlation 0.4).Conclusions: Universal screening of antenatal women, irrespective of their age and parity is suggested. DMT has highest diagnostic value and best correlation with the results of karyotyping. Hence the dual marker test can be considered to be better test for screening for aneuploidy

Pipelining in multi-query optimization

AbstractDatabase systems frequently have to execute a set of related queries, which share several common subexpressions. Multi-query optimization exploits this, by finding evaluation plans that share common results. Current approaches to multi-query optimization assume that common subexpressions are materialized. Significant performance benefits can be had if common subexpressions are pipelined to their uses, without being materialized. However, plans with pipelining may not always be realizable with limited buffer space, as we show. We present a general model for schedules with pipelining, and present a necessary and sufficient condition for determining validity of a schedule under our model. We show that finding a valid schedule with minimum cost is NP-hard. We present a greedy heuristic for finding good schedules. Finally, we present a performance study that shows the benefit of our algorithms on batches of queries from the TPCD benchmark

Comparative Performance of Mango Varieties Grafted on Vellaikolamban and Mixed Rootstock

Research on rootstock in mango is very limited in our country. Kalapady was reported to be a dwarfing rootstock. Recent trend among mango growers is to high density orcharding with dwarfening nature of the varietie. Efforts were made at Agriculture Research Station, Mulde, to study comparative performance of Ratna, Alphonso and Kesar mango on Vellaikolamban and mixed rootstock i.e., heterozygous seedling stock and the effect of rootstock on a scion under high density of 5m x 5m spacing. Results indicated that use of Vellaikolamban rootstock reduced plant volume in scion cv. Alphonso by 39.1%, followed by 24.9% in Ratna and 26.5% in cv. Kesar. As volume of the canopy was reduced, it directly influenced fruit yield cvs. Alphonso and Ratna. However, reduction in canopy volume had a positive influence on yield in cv. Kesar. Net returns of Rs.38,629/- per ha were maximum for Kesar with the rootstock Vellaikolamban

Pretrained Language Models for Sequential Sentence Classification

As a step toward better document-level understanding, we explore classification of a sequence of sentences into their corresponding categories, a task that requires understanding sentences in context of the document. Recent successful models for this task have used hierarchical models to contextualize sentence representations, and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) to incorporate dependencies between subsequent labels. In this work, we show that pretrained language models, BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) in particular, can be used for this task to capture contextual dependencies without the need for hierarchical encoding nor a CRF. Specifically, we construct a joint sentence representation that allows BERT Transformer layers to directly utilize contextual information from all words in all sentences. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on four datasets, including a new dataset of structured scientific abstracts.Comment: EMNLP 201

Challenges for Efficient Query Evaluation on Structured Probabilistic Data

Query answering over probabilistic data is an important task but is generally intractable. However, a new approach for this problem has recently been proposed, based on structural decompositions of input databases, following, e.g., tree decompositions. This paper presents a vision for a database management system for probabilistic data built following this structural approach. We review our existing and ongoing work on this topic and highlight many theoretical and practical challenges that remain to be addressed.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure, 23 references. Accepted for publication at SUM 201